Makes sense, thanks for the reply. You have a point about “diff by line”, and I might have not gone all in on serious roff to land on all the benefits.
Another thing I see as an example of markdown being slightly more readable: Unlike roff, not needing to escape some typographical marks (like - to get a hyphen). And the better syntax highlighting support for stuff like bold, italics, and so on in Markdown.
Bold, italics and other text decorations are supported in roff just well. I agree that there is a readability advantage of
This is an example text with three italic words
over
This is an example text with
.I three italic words
(using the ms macro, of course), but I’d argue that the additional complexity of throwing more markup languages on it when you already use roff anyway is not really worth it. YMMV, of course.
Good point about style; I was thinking more about \f[I] than .I. So yeah, I see that if you have every semantic thing on its own line, diffing and maybe readability is better.
Makes sense, thanks for the reply. You have a point about “diff by line”, and I might have not gone all in on serious roff to land on all the benefits.
Another thing I see as an example of markdown being slightly more readable: Unlike roff, not needing to escape some typographical marks (like - to get a hyphen). And the better syntax highlighting support for stuff like bold, italics, and so on in Markdown.
Bold, italics and other text decorations are supported in roff just well. I agree that there is a readability advantage of
This is an example text with three italic words
over
This is an example text with
.I three italic words
(using the
msmacro, of course), but I’d argue that the additional complexity of throwing more markup languages on it when you already use roff anyway is not really worth it. YMMV, of course.Good point about style; I was thinking more about
\f[I]than.I. So yeah, I see that if you have every semantic thing on its own line, diffing and maybe readability is better.